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Sunday, January 24, 2016

Notable Quote: The Duty to be Grateful

I
have never heard of Forest McDonald.
Apparently he was a well know historian who died a few days ago on the
19th. From the New YorkTimes:

Forrest McDonald, a
presidential and constitutional scholar who challenged liberal shibboleths
about early American history and lionized the founding fathers as uniquely
intellectual, died on Tuesday in Tuscaloosa, Ala. He was 89.

And
he was a conservative, which surprises me that I had not heard of him. But I don’t read a lot of historians. More from the obituary:

As a Pulitzer Prize
finalist in history and a professor at the University of Alabama, Dr. McDonald
declared himself an ideological conservative and an opponent of intrusive
government. (“I’d move the winter capital to North Dakota and outlaw
air-conditioning in the District of Columbia,” he once said.) But he refused to
be pigeonholed either as a libertarian or, despite his Southern agrarian roots,
as a Jeffersonian.

I
can describe that attitude no better than by saying that one has a duty to be
grateful and joyful in the very fact of one’s existence, and in the existence
of one’s fellow human beings…. And given the existence of human beings, the
probabilities against my own existence—or yours—are again as high as those
against the existence of man. You can attribute this to God, or to big bangs,
or to sheer blind luck; all I can do is shout hallelujah, I got here! My God, I
got here! In the face of this colossal fact, I must exult in my gratitude, for
everything else is trivial; no matter what the uncertainties, whether things
are better or worse, whether I am hungry or well fed, whether I am sick or
healthy, or cold or comfortable, or honored and respected or despised and
kicked and beaten, even that I shall soon be leaving, all is trivial compared
to the fact that I got here. I am a miracle, and so, dear reader, are you. Let
us rejoice together.

-Forrest
McDonald, Recovering the Past: A Historian’s Memoir

That
truly is a memorable quote, and so true.
We should be grateful for every moment.